Two thirds of organizations surveyed for a recent report said they suffered a data breach that resulted from employees using mobile devices to access confidential company information, according to the San Francisco-based security firm Lookout and Traverse City, Mich.-based Ponemon Institute.

The companies said an average of 3% of employees' mobile devices are infected with malware at any point in time, which equals more than 1,700 mobile devices in a typical organization that connect to an enterprise network every day. A mobile data breach could therefore cost enterprises more than $26 million, according to the report, titled, "The Economic Risk of Confidential Data on Mobile Devices in the Workplace."

The report, based on responses from 588 IT and security leaders, also revealed mobile devices could be a critical part of any cyberattack. The study examined the risk introduced by employees accessing increasing amounts of corporate data via their mobile devices and assigned a cost to a mobile-related breach.